


folklore

by picarats



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Backstory, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26814460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picarats/pseuds/picarats
Summary: She’s born in Illinois but grows up in the California sun, knuckles bruised and bloody from the punching bag hung outside of their trailer. Allison Cameron claws her way out of the hot tarmac like a dandelion, roots of a flower ripped out by tire treads and future roadkill. She buries herself in textbooks, in other people’s smiles, in odd bets on losing dogs and in the stagnant water of a creek nearby.(Cameron-centric, set pre-Season 1. Cameron/Foreman.)
Relationships: Allison Cameron/Eric Foreman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	folklore

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own anything.
> 
> (Fun fact: Cameron is the only duckling out of the original team who has no concrete backstory, other than the fact that she's from Chicago (which, I think, was only mentioned once), that she interned at the Mayo Clinic (again, only mentioned once) and that she used to be married. This fic, subsequently, is the result of me screaming into a pan and slamming the lid shut on it. Bon appetit!)

_standing honey_

There has always been blood on Cameron’s hands.

She’s born in Illinois but grows up in the California sun, knuckles bruised and bloody from the punching bag hung outside of their trailer. Allison Cameron claws her way out of the hot tarmac like a dandelion, roots of a flower ripped out by tire treads and future roadkill. She buries herself in textbooks, in other people’s smiles, in odd bets on losing dogs and in the stagnant water of a creek nearby.

She has her father’s surname as her middle and her mother’s as her last; her first name means _noble_ , but she’ll never quite figure out how her parents chose it or why.

She’s the first one out of her friend group to get a job and the first one to drive. At sixteen, armed with money from the drugstore she’s stood for hours behind the cash register at, she makes her way through the thickets and the weeds to the town’s second hand car dealership, haggles her way down to a price that the banger she’s fallen in love with should be at and drives it out of there.

Cameron spends the entire summer fixing it up.

Her best friend from childhood is the boy the world expects her to fall in love with. They date during junior year and Cameron endures the customary giggles and jabs from her girlfriends until they kiss for the first time and all butterflies die off. It’s very morbid. There’s a faint memory of herself and him on a warm Saturday that Cameron can almost touch whenever she gets too drunk and morose, her head on his lap, his fingers carding through her hair.

Her mother is a travelling hairdresser; her father is an army doctor until he’s suddenly not, anymore and he never comes home again. Her father’s brother is a successful lawyer with a brownstone in Albany; the first time Cameron meets him is two weeks after her father’s service when he invites them to stay. She’s seventeen, eyes bright with anxiety and grief, clutching her brother’s tiny hand and as soon as she sees Uncle James she stops short.

 _He doesn’t look a thing like him_ , she thinks. She doesn’t know whether to cry or be relieved.

Cameron spends the entire stay exploring as far as she can within daylight hours. New York is Cali without the Cali, her knuckles without the band aids. The buildings are taller and the bricks are dirtier and the weather has a bite to it that Cameron sees in her own face more than she does her friends. She can see her own unclear reflection in the rivers and the shop windows.

She takes a ‘secret’ trip to New York City in the middle of the holiday, a day after her family all went together and Cameron had found herself traipsing all around the best tourist traps. She tells Uncle James that she’s going to be a couple of hours — she doesn’t want to get too lost — and he looks at her as if he can see right through her. Then he slips her a fifty dollar note — the most money she’s ever had to hand since she bought her car — and tells her to try the coffee at a certain street number.

Not-so-secret, then.

Nearly three hours later, she’s at Penn Station. For the first time in her life, Cameron is truly alone. It’s exhilarating and overwhelming, like the moment in between the climb and the drop, the scream. She stumbles her way through the crowd with little grace, exiting out onto 33rd Street with a not-quite fall and a grin. She grabs a fleeting second to take it all in, the high rise buildings a vignette ring around the late fall sky, the graffiti on the walls around her, the cars playing Frogger on the street.

When she comes back down to Earth, there’s a boy staring at her, the wedge he’s holding in between the car he’s standing next to and the door. He’s got a slim jim in his right hand.

She blinks at him. He blinks back.

“I’m not stealing it,” he says, after a moment. “I’m locked out.”

Despite the situation, Cameron finds herself moving closer, hand surreptitiously curled around the pepper spray in her coat pocket. He’s her age, maybe, or a little bit younger. His brown eyes are frightened, but there’s steel in his voice.

They’re perfect strangers. And yet.

“You’re right,” she says, nodding at the wedge. “You’re not. You need to put the wedge in the weather strip, not the top of the door. The rubber thingy.”

The boy looks at her as if she’s grown a second head, but he goes along with it. Half a minute later, the door pops open.

“I have a really shitty car,” Cameron says, when the boy raises an eyebrow at her. “You learn these things.”

“Eric,” he says, after a moment.

“Ally,” she replies. “You know where the good coffee is around here?”

Eric laughs, shaking his head. It’s light, rough with disuse and yet it’s really not the California high-pitched throw-your-head-back job she’s used to, the fevered and glitzy laugh she hears in the school corridor.

“‘Course I do,” he says, as if any other answer would be unthinkable. “Come on.”

Looking back, climbing into a stolen car with a boy Cameron’s just met is not a good example to set for her fellow seventeen year old girls finding themselves in new cities. It changes her life, though. It’s one of those points that she can later spin out into the rest of the threads of her personal history, strings wrapped around each other on a cork-board.

They get out on the same street her Uncle recommended, but they don’t go to that same coffee house. The barista smiles at Eric and glowers at Cameron — and Cameron gets to point it out when they’ve ordered and sat at one of the tables next to a dirty window.

“No, she doesn’t,” Eric replies, but now he’s looking behind Cameron’s shoulder and trying to see behind her.

“She’s cute,” Cameron comments. “You’re sure?”

Eric rolls his eyes in such a way that reminds Cameron of her brother — all years-won and suffered — and makes her wonder if it’s a trait of just boys or of all the people she interacts with, a natural reaction to herself unfiltered. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Cameron says, trying her best to inject a tone of disbelief. Eric snorts. “So, Eric. You have a lot of practise with cars?”

“Not yet,” Eric says, curling his fingers around the mug of coffee in front of him. “My brother always did that part.”

“So where’s he?”

“Prison,” he says. It’s pretty succinct in itself.

Cameron clears her throat. “Oh,” she says, frozen for a second. Then she inwardly chastises herself, because _Jesus_. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Eric shrugs. He makes a face, the kind that tells Cameron that he doesn’t want to discuss it because all that can be said has been. “Why are you in New York?”

“Visiting family,” Cameron replies. New subject, got it. “My uncle. He lives upstate, we’re from Barstow. California,” she elaborates.

He whistles. “Long way to travel, valley girl.”

“Barstow’s in the desert, actually,” Cameron finds herself saying. Because _that’s_ what’s important. “First time I’ve really been this far out of the state.”

“I’ve never left,” Eric says. Then he makes another face. “Okay, maybe that’s not true, but Jersey doesn’t count.”

“Never been,” says Cameron.

“Do not go to New Jersey,” Eric warns, obviously repeating something he’d said and heard often. “Everything’s terrible there.”

She doesn’t listen to his advice, eventually. Neither does he, to be fair.

For now, though, they talk a little bit longer. It’s liberating, telling the most mundane of secrets to a stranger. She can see the image of herself forming in Eric’s looking glass, a truest version to her own head she’s ever seen. He’s kind and his heart bleeds in a way Cameron knows he doesn’t want anyone to notice. His world is half a country away from hers and yet they’ve both seen the same skies, the same horizons, the same stars.

“You do not have a 4.0,” Cameron exclaims, beaming. “I’ve not met _anyone_ with a 4.0.”

“That probably says more about you than it does me,” Eric replies, dumping a sugar sachet into his coffee. “I want to be a doctor. Go to an Ivy League, or something. Make a difference.”

“I can get that,” Cameron says. “I think you’d make a great doctor.”

“You’ve known me for half an hour,” Eric points out, but he’s smiling.

“So?”

Eric doesn’t have an answer for that that isn’t an eyebrow raise.

Cameron shrugs. “My dad was a doctor,” she says and as carefree as she wants it to sound it comes out hard and deliberate. “Army.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eric says. His hand is on her own. When had that happened? “How long ago?”

“Not your fault,” she parrots, exhaling through her nose. “Nearly a month.”

Eric’s thumb brushes the back of her hand. “Were you close?”

The answer’s on the tip of her tongue, a practised one that her brain fires up without being asked to. It’s almost like a cardigan, the kind you slip on when it gets too cold without thinking about the colour or the itch. But asked by someone that doesn’t know what she’s supposed to reply — that’s something new, something that stops her from saying it.

“No,” she says, after a moment. It’s a truth that she isn’t supposed to say, but it is true — her father had never been around other than when he was and those times had been few and far between. The man she took half of herself from had stretched himself ever further away from their trailer in Barstow each time she’d seen him again. “I don’t think we were.”

_you were my town_

Cameron returns to her home town with a phone number burning a hole in her favourite winter coat.

She takes it out before she buries the jacket in the back of her wardrobe, because California in the winter isn’t really a place for wool, steel or warm textile. She swaps gloves and scarves for t-shirts under button ups and loose hair free of elastics. Cameron goes to thrift stores with her girls, a group tied together with invisible barbed wire, those with the names and telephone numbers that have been burned into her brain over time. Allison-and-Lori-and-Ines-and-Kristin-and-Tonya. They find white clothes, cut out the labels and dye them all the colours they can afford, blush pinks and yellows, blacks that wash out into greys.

Because phoning cross-country is too expensive for them both, Eric and her communicate through their email, sent directly from their nearby public libraries. He writes to her about his dreams, his studies and how he fears that he doesn’t have anyone that believes that he can do what he wants to, that he’ll get no farther than New York City. She writes to him about her adventures, the rumours she hears, her own studies and how she’d like to get as far away from Cali as possible, actually, cross-country at best. He tells her they’ll be passing ships in the night, to look out for his sail.

This is not falling in love, Cameron tells herself. She hasn’t even told anyone about him, even, because she doesn’t want those teases, those feelings inevitably appearing, those butterflies escaping her. She doesn’t want to see Eric in a school corridor and have to pretend she wasn’t looking his way. This letter writing is all that they have to whatever collective name they share, two teenagers on the off-beat finding some kind of solace in each other.

Her brother starts high school. He gets in more fights in their backyard, horrifying their mother. She has to stop herself from stepping in, both because he doesn’t appreciate it and because the sand and the dirt is starting to get in under her painted fingernails. Cameron has to learn to let go, has to let the rage and the righteousness roll off her back like water.

It’s not something that she can completely ignore, though and she spends too many nights of her senior year tending to baby brother’s wounds using her father’s old textbooks and journals.

Then it’s not just the nights and it’s not just when her family is getting hurt: Cameron takes the books and her flashlight to read in bed when she can’t sleep, finding something and someone she’d never really known in the handwritten margins. She’s lingering at the library after she writes her emails to Eric, trawling through what she can find to do with medicine. It’s a massive leap from what she’s doing now in school, even with her high GPA and the way she usually just clicks with science.

Her head is usually swimming by the end.

Luckily, she’s got a friend on the other side of the country to help her out. Eric initially calls her a copycat, but then later on tells her that he’s proud of her. It’s the sort of mixed messaging that Cameron can appreciate the sentiment behind.

He starts to sign the end of his messages off with his last name only, just ‘Foreman’, because he says that that’s what he’s probably going to be called for the rest of his life as a doctor anyway. In response, she writes to him only as ‘Cameron’. She still lets him call her Ally, though, because it’s nice to have a nickname no-one else has given you other than yourself.

Prom rears its head around the corner as soon as they finish their SATs. ‘Foreman’ is planning to ask Barista Girl out and Cameron encourages him to do so with the kind of force that only really exposes how envious she is of him having someone other than an awkward not-quite-ex to ask. He points this out multiple times, but whenever he does she makes sure to send him the most horrendous-looking ecard she can find.

(Just in case he decides to open his email at school. Cameron is so not above being petty.)

She and her girls decide to represent third-wave feminism at the dance, which translates into showing up, arms interlocked with each other, no boys or boyfriends in sight. They get more than a few stares. They welcome them.

When she logs into the computer at the library the weekend after, Foreman’s chronicled his own Prom experience for her own reading pleasure, talking about how Barista Girl said yes and that they spent the evening dancing at arm’s length to leave room for Jesus and at least two apostles. She writes back, tells him about her friend Ines winning Prom Queen, being head of so many committees that she’s probably only rivalled by the school Principal, how Cameron had screamed for her at the top of her lungs, throat still sore.

He sends her a single heart back, spelled out with a less-than sign and a single three.

(This is not falling in love.)

_cutting me open and healing me fine_

The heading of the University of Chicago is the first thing Cameron sees when she opens the mail, one day in April.

She stews on it for a day, taking the time to stress and ask herself if this is what she really wants to do. Foreman’s the only one that really knows what she wants to do. Going pre-med is a massive commitment. It all spills out to her Mom in the middle of her next haircut, after she comments that Cameron should’ve had her acceptance or rejection letters by now and Cameron can’t help but correct her.

Her mother pauses, scissors in her hand stopped mid-cut. This, Cameron immediately realises, is probably the worst time to announce possible life decisions. “I’m sorry?”

“I’ve been accepted into their pre-med program,” Cameron goes on. “I’ve got the grades for it. I want to be a doctor.” _Like Dad._

 _“_ It makes sense,” her Mom says, resuming her haircut after a beat of tangible grief they can both hear echo. “You clean up after Justin all the time. You cleaned up after yourself, too, when you were younger.”

“You noticed that, huh,” Cameron says. It sounds like a foregone conclusion.

“I’m grateful for it,” her Mom says. They carry on for a bit, both in silence, each mulling over new information. “You stay safe, Allison.”

“As houses, Mom,” Cameron says, extending that saying to California trailer parks as well. Better to be safe than sorry. “As houses.”

It’s a dry summer, arid and dusty and filled with pre-reading and trying to pack up what she can take of her life in little brown cardboard boxes. Uncle James sends an obscene cheque that she stashes away somewhere or someplace she can’t now remember, planning to cash it in when she gets to Illinois.

The nights are spent tracing her way through photos of her family, those taken before it became hers, memories of the outskirts of Chicago she was never privy to as a baby.

One night, as she’s patching up her brother, telling him that she’s going to take it professional, he asks her why she’s going so far, why she’s leaving them behind. He’s going to their local community college. Why can’t she?

Here’s her answer: It’s a home she’s never known. It’s a home she once had and one she’s going to see again. He tells her that he doesn’t want her poetry. Cameron has never been one for poetry, but, yes, it’s almost like it rhymes — and suddenly she can see herself, younger than her brother, begging her father to stay.

Foreman gets into Columbia. She almost gets kicked out of the library from squealing when she gets the news through his very excited email. She tells him not to forget her when he becomes a famous neurologist. He asks her if there’s such a thing as a ‘famous neurologist’.

 _‘Freud, you dick,’_ she replies.

’ _That’s very Freudian.’_

_‘Thank you, I think. Also, Francis Bacon.’_

_’Now you’re making me hungry.’_

Her girls are spreading out as far as they can. Some days, the chains they’ve wrapped around themselves to keep together at any cost feel like they’re too tight to not break; some days they feel looser than ever. Ines, the Prom Queen, invites them all over one night, a sleepover, calling back to the old days when Chicago and Portland, Florida and Barstow Community College weren’t on the horizon. It’s never said for fear of taboo, but by God does Cameron know that this is the last one they’ll ever have.

If she thinks too hard about it, she’ll never think about anything else again.

And then she’s in Chicago, back in the place where she came from, originally, the place she’d promised herself about, daydreaming during the hottest trailer park nights when her father was only at war and not six feet under. Her terrible car gets her there, but only just and as soon as Cameron steps out onto the college campus she _understands_. New York might have been her without bandages, but Chicago is the very definition of an open wound, the kind you see in HBO dramas and medical textbooks, splashed haphazardly with any alcohol on hand to try and clean it up. Not with wine but with a flaming Molotov.

And, somehow, she’d been formed in the fire of it all, ash scattered to the desert winds.

She can’t kid herself any longer; it’s not home. But it’s belonging. It’s the scary type of belonging that makes Cameron reassess who she is, at the kind of base level she’s only comfortable getting to whilst drunk. So that’s what she does, for a while — goes out and gets drunk, morose, delicate, incendiary. Goes home with different people. Men. (Mostly.)

If she’d told Foreman about it — and, seeing as though their emails are getting more and more sporadic, it’s not like she’ll ever get a relevant moment to do so — he’d tell her she’s being self destructive. She knows this. So she doesn’t.

Time heals all wounds. Cameron’s just got to wait it out.

Foreman and Barista Girl — she’s been told her name, she _has_ , but damned if Cameron’s ever been able to remember it — break up mid-semester. From what she can glean, Barista Girl had gone cross-state for college and subsequently found that she wanted the whole college sorority girl experience, including dating fraternity boys. Apparently, Foreman’s medical society hadn’t made the cut.

She thinks about calling him, actually hearing his voice and being something a little more real than a digital shoulder to cry on. But Cameron doesn’t know his cell number now he’s got one and he doesn’t know hers. In three months, he’s gone from her only confidant to the last cling-on of her old life. It’s melancholy and it’s horrible, but it’s like she’s putting on a show for him — giving him all of the last remnants of Ally-from-the-not-quite-valley she can give without losing herself entirely.

Foreman’s picked up on it, but he hasn’t said anything yet. ‘ _See, this is why I like you’,_ she sends, one hungover morning out of many. ‘ _You deal with all of my bullshit.’_

_‘I have a lot of practise.’_

_‘Rude.’_

_‘True.’_

Lecture halls blur into each other. Cameron wears the same hoodie for a straight week, some sorority piece from the floor of a room she’d scarpered from when the sun had come up. Her roommate is never in their dorm. It suits her just fine.

Life goes on.

_sequin smile, black lipstick_

Nearly-Christmas — because that’s how capitalist America realises the passing of time and yes, Cameron is now taking a sociology class — whips Chicago into a blizzard. There’s a reason why they call it the Windy City, she realises, one evening as she stumbles down the snow-drenched street: it’s always goddamn windy.

She’s got to decide whether she’s going home for the holidays. It’s a hard decision and that’s what’s so difficult about it, that it is so difficult. She hates the idea of staying at college — but she has work to do for the new year and she hasn’t got the resources to do any of it with ease back in Cali.

Her dreams are single glimpses of relief from it. From adulthood. From being nineteen, alone in a city that’s too much for her to love. In the evenings, when she wakes up from the morning-afternoon haze, to make any sense of it, she goes to a place that exemplifies it. Somewhere Cameron wouldn’t be if she weren’t already an adult. With a fake ID.

(A bar. Does she have to spell it out any further?)

She nods at Neil the bartender, takes a moment to mentally grimace because she knows his name is Neil off the top of her head, slides onto a wooden stool and pretends to take a moment to order.

Then a man she doesn’t recognise sits next to her.

Cameron gives it a second, but she eventually has to ask, because there are open seats literally everywhere else. “Did you want to buy me a drink?”

The man gives her a sideways glance, as if he’d just realised she was sitting there. “Little bit presumptuous,” he says. “Maybe I just wanted to check out your rack.”

Cameron splutters. “I —”

“Plus,” he adds, “you shouldn’t even be in here. You’re under 21, Buffy the Beer-Bad Slayer. Did you hear me?” He leans over the table slightly, raising his voice to grab Neil and the other patrons’ attention. “She’s under —”

“Shut up!” Cameron hisses, grabbing his arm and pulling him back. She takes him in for a minute, premature grey hair, GQ stubble, sad-slash-shocked-that-you-would-dare-to-touch-me blue eyes. And despite all of that, all of those hallmarks of Tired Misogynist Syndrome, she can tell he’s intrigued. “How did you know?”

The guy scoffs, as if that itself is an answer. Scratches his chin. “Crows feet,” he says, suddenly. Cameron, horrified, goes to touch her face. He grabs her hand before she can, calloused fingers on the back of it and in a moment she’s in New York, with Foreman, spilling the blood of her heart about what she needed to back then. “Relax. You don’t have any.”

Cameron snatches her hand back. “What are you, some kind of Sherlock Holmes?”

“Almost,” he says. “I’m in diagnostics. And I’m a foot model, on Sundays. Daddy was a preacher,” he adds, dropping into a strong southern drawl. “Never liked me working on the Lord’s day, but I had to put myself through med school somehow. Then I carried on because I liked it.”

She laughs, despite herself. “Seen you in anything?”

The guy considers. “If you have,” he says, “it’s a you problem.”

“I’ve never seen you here before.”

“That’s because I’m not usually here,” the guy says, eyes wide, as if this is a concept that Cameron’s never considered. She could murder him, but she’s pretty sure that’s the point. “My girlfriend’s on the circuit. She’s mingling with some very important people at a gala tonight.” He pronounces the words as if he’s decided that ‘gala’ is the most interesting one of the bunch.

Cameron frowns. “Where’s she?”

“At the _gala_ ,” the guy says. It’s the same look as before.

She raises an eyebrow. “And you’re here, getting drunk?”

“Like you can talk,” he replies. “Don’t look at me like that. Shaky hands, irritability that most women would blame on PMS, the way you’re ogling that scotch on the wall like it’s a poster of Michael Shanks. You’re a junkie.”

“I’m not an addict,” Cameron says, flushing. Her cheeks feel hollow.

“Of course you are,” the guy says. He drinks his beer. “Liar, too, but everybody lies. Why are you here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be cramming for a final, or whatever?”

“It’s December,” she points out.

“Is it,” the guy says, flatly. He shakes his head. “The passing of linear time never ceases to amaze. C’mon, spill! Pretend I’m your sorority sister.” He affects a valley girl accent. “Isn’t Kyle _so_ dreamy?”

“Not in a sorority,” corrects Cameron, but the way he’s told her she’s irritable is sticking in her head in the worst way. “I need to decide whether I’m going home for the holidays. But,” and she can’t believe that she’s spilling her worries to a stranger — _again,_ does she have a problem or what — “I don’t know where home is anymore.”

“Bad home life?”

“Not so much,” Cameron says. She shakes her head. “I think I’ve changed too much to go back.” And isn’t that the bitch of it all? A semester in Chicago and high school her has been all but packed up into a dusty box and stuffed into the back of an attic. She’s just been left with who she is now — a friend to none but one, with said guy a long weekend away in a different state. “I know I should, but I can’t.”

The guy clicks his tongue, draws little stars on the wood of the bar top with his index finger. He smells like smoke, Cameron realises; everyone has their vice. Especially her.

He clears his throat and looks at her, really looks at her; those hard blues are softening, just a little, the kind of reaction that you can’t help when you’ve just started on two fingers of whiskey. “Why do you think I’m here, instead of with Wilson? And Stacy?”

Cameron smiles, in conceit. “Which one’s the girlfriend?” she ventures.

“Depends on who you ask,” he says. The way the side of his mouth twists tells her he’s had this conversation before.

“You should go to her.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking up at the ceiling. They lapse into a comfortable silence for a minute, enjoying — or, in truth, just barely acknowledging — each other’s company.

Cameron looks around the bar. It’s weirdly quiet, but she’s guessing that most of the regulars are busy watching some kind of big game — she’d heard some of the guys in the mess hall talking about pulling together a watch party for a Blackhawks match.

It’s one of the few dives she’s been to that doesn’t have any kind of television; when she’d asked Neil, he’d said it had gotten broken during a particularly nasty brawl. She’d immediately thought of her punching bag back home and then wondered if that little gospel of hometown life was going to some day lead to an epiphany: something particularly self-revelatory that would make some sense of what she’d seen of herself.

She’s still holding out for it, really.

“So,” the guy says, snapping Cameron back to reality: a place where she’s busy sitting next to a drunk guy in a rumpled suit instead of figuring out what part of herself to trust to be her own making. “Want to hook up?”

Cameron gives the guy a flat look. “You should go to her,” she repeats.

“Ugh, you sound like Wilson. Big heart, loves to repeat his points when he’s losing. You’d be fast friends. Plus, I’m over the legal limit,” he says, running a finger around the rim of his glass. He sighs. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

Surprising herself, Cameron says, “I’ll drive.”

The guy blinks. Then, Cameron thinks, he belatedly realises that since he’s yelled her age out to the entire bar she hasn’t had the chance to order any alcohol. “Guess I can’t say no to that. If I get the bends in your car,” he says, “it’s your fault.”

“Great,” says Cameron. She helps him off of his stool.

They get to the hotel in twenty minutes, her driving just under the speed limit and the guy _apparently_ barely hanging on whilst wisecracking about the state of her car the entire journey. By the time they arrive, she’s almost glad to be rid of him.

Almost. He’s grown on her, kind of. Just a little bit.

The guy raps on her window a couple of seconds after he cantilevers himself from her back seat. “Hey, you want a job after you graduate from med school?”

“I —” Cameron blinks, then realises she’s still wearing her Chicago college sweater. Sherlock Holmes, indeed. “Sure?”

“Get sober,” he says, nods as if this is enough of an explanation, going to leave.

Cameron leans out of her window, still — admittedly — kind of confused. “Uh, who do I ask for? And where?”

“Greg House,” the guy calls back, doing a turn as he walks away. “Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Jersey. Write it on the label of your bra!”

Cameron watches him go, dumbfounded. She sinks back into her car seat, thinking.

Processing.

If she’s going to be sober in every sense of the word, Cameron has to be honest with herself — and if she’s going to do _that,_ she has to acknowledge that at this moment in time, there’s only really one voice she wants to hear.

And God, Foreman would kill her if she went to go and work in New Jersey, wouldn’t he?

She drives back to her dorm, takes out her flip phone (a new investment, not so much of a regret as the hole in her phone bill) and follows her fears all the way down by punching in that number, the one she’s learned off by heart.

It rings. And rings. And r _ings_.

A mature woman’s voice, one Cameron doesn’t recognise, picks up. “Hello? Foreman household, Alicia speaking.”

“Hi,” Cameron says, cringing at her own awkwardness. “Could I talk to Eric, please? It’s, uh, Ally.”

Alicia Foreman pauses. “Oh, honey,” she says, “Eric moved away for college. I can give you his new number, if you want?”

Cameron smiles, tired, resting her head against the window. The Chicago wind has whisked itself into a full-on storm, rain battering against the glass. Lightning’s peeking out behind tiny, navy blue clouds, like some slight of hand gone slightly ethereal. She’s got a headache, but it’s getting better.

This word, the next one she’s about to say: it’s a little prayer of her own devising, one Cameron’s been thinking about for too long for her not to kneel and say.

“Please,” she says and she’s never meant anything more.

Foreman returns her call in the morning, when the storm’s cleared itself from the evening sky and left all but a white, overcast sky in its place. If snow was something she’d never seen before, she’d wonder if that was what was coming, if the kind of White Christmases Bing Crosby warbled about were making their way to her, to make up for all those Jesus-birthdays past.

“You sound different to how I remember,” he says, two minutes into their conversation, after they’ve dispensed with the pleasantries and the _oh-my-god-how-did-you-get-my-number_ s. “Like you’re kind of clearer. More brusque.”

Cameron nods, then remembers that he can’t see her. “Yeah, I guess,” she says. “I’m in a different state, remember? Accent’s creeping in.”

“I remember,” Foreman says. There’s a tiny rustling noise, like he’s smoothing out note paper, or he’s transferring the phone from his shoulder to his hand. She honestly can’t tell anymore — or imagine, as it were. “So, what’s up?”

 _Now or never._ “This is me trying,” she says, clears her throat when she thinks that she can’t just leave it there and trust he’ll know what she means. “I feel like I’m standing on the cliff, yelling, ‘Tell me the reason I can’t fit in anywhere’ — and no one’s here to give me an answer.”

Foreman breathes out deeply. “So you’re not okay, are you?”

“Not even close,” Cameron says. Now she’s starting on it, it feels like it’s all spilling out: all the lists of typed words she’s deleted, all the shades of blue she’s kept locked inside, all the best laid plans that have burned into ash and burrowed themselves under her fingernails. She’s fucking drowning in them. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Okay,” Foreman says. Then she starts crying and he just repeats it, over and over until she calms down. “Ally, leave.”

Cameron shakes her head. “I want to be a _doctor_ ,” she presses. It’s imperative, suddenly, that he gets this — even if he already does. She’s worn thin and she’s grown and it’s not going to be for nothing. She’s never left anything well enough alone, not even herself.

“Transfer your credits,” he says promptly and turns her entire life sideways. Because that is something that Cameron hasn’t even thought of. She has no defence for it, either — it seems so simple, too.

“Where to?”

“Come to New York for a weekend,” Foreman says. “We’ll figure it out together.”

This is why she has him, she thinks. This is why he has her too.

_you know, I left a part of me back in New York_

When Cameron works up the courage to tell her mother she’s going on a flight to another state to visit a friend for the holidays, she sort of leaves out the part where it’s not a friend from her group of girls, it’s a guy friend and it’s someone that she’s only met in person once, years ago. She’s got the uncanny notion that either one of those points would sink her ship immediately.

It doesn’t really go down well. Her brother steals the phone at a crucial moment when she thinks that she’s winning the argument and calls her crazy. He says that she seems angry after she chews him out for it. She asks him if he thinks she’ll be more when he finishes his little rant. At the end of that rather pleasant conversation, Cameron’s pretty sure they probably wouldn’t want her back for winter break anyway.

It’s just as well. She’d rather be in New York.

Uncle James agrees to pick her up from JFK. He’s just started his retirement, he says, when Cameron asks what he would’ve been doing if she hadn’t called him up to ask for a favour. And, if she hadn’t called, he adds, this day would’ve just been another one to contribute to him going insane out of boredom.

 _Polite laughter,_ she tells herself and desperately tries not to correlate that to her own days, back in Barstow. Maybe she’s more similar to her uncle than she thinks.

“I’m going out of town for a couple of days,” he says, once they arrive at the brownstone. “I can trust you to take good care of the place.” It’s not a question — Uncle James is looking at her as if he’s already seen enough evidence to decide it.

She can’t help but ask. “Why?”

“You’re your father’s daughter,” he answers. He doesn’t quite commit to clapping her on the shoulder, but it’s the kind of statement Cameron assumes would go before one. The Cameron-Wilson clan takes care of each other, but not to the extent that they’re bro-ing around. “I don’t need to know anything else, kid.”

Uncle James stays long enough for them to order in dinner together and to break out the old family albums — photos of childhood she’s only been able to remember through her own fading memories. There’s one of her and her older cousin — Uncle James’ son, apparently now a doctor himself (and isn’t that a weird pattern) and named after his father — shooting each other with water pistols in a backyard she’ll privately admit she doesn’t recognise.

Her younger self looks indignant. She’s fighting for something she believes in — namely, here, drenching James Wilson Jr. with water. Cameron smiles. _Some things never change,_ she thinks.

The farther they get in the album, the older the photos become. Soon they’ve flipped far past her baby photos and Cameron’s plunged into stills she has no hope to recognise. It still hurts, she realises, seeing her father’s face again — there’s a fire under the scars that had been left by his — well, his departure, for lack of a less incendiary word. And the fact that she knows how the story ends — how the hero dies — makes her ask herself why she’s sat here, letting herself look at these memories.

But she doesn’t want any other kind of sadness. It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t be right. So she sits. And they look, for a while. It’s still just as hard, but they carry on, swapping stories Cameron’s never known and ones that feel familiar but half-made up.

You can be grateful for sadness, she thinks. It’s proof that you can still feel.

_would it be enough, if I could never give you peace?_

Uncle James is gone in the morning. Cameron sits alone at breakfast. She’s comfortable. For the first time in a really, really long time.

“Same time zone,” she says into the phone as a greeting, half-dressed and contemplating shirts from her still-packed suitcase, because that’s how Allison Cameron rolls. “You know what that means.”

“You can watch Saturday Night Live when it airs,” Foreman replies, hiding some sort of laughter. She can hear it in his voice. “I’m jealous, Ally.”

“So can you,” Cameron points out. The blue blouse? Maybe the white, actually. “It’ll take me about two hours to drive down to Columbia,” she says. “Any particular time you want to meet up?”

“Two _hours?”_ Foreman says. “Where _are_ you?”

“Albany.”

Foreman processes this. “So, when I said, ‘let’s meet up’, you immediately thought to stay the furthest away you could get from me,” he says.

“Well, no,” Cameron says. “It might look that way, granted, but — and hear me out on this one — it’s my uncle’s place, so I don’t have to pay a thing.”

She can feel Foreman shaking his head down the line. “I’ll see you soon,” he says. “Three PM? And don’t tell me you’re still driving that car you were telling me about.”

“Fine, I won’t,” Cameron says, pulling the white tee over her head. “But don’t say you won’t be disappointed when I show up without it.”

Foreman then hangs up on her. She really can’t blame him.

She crosses the threshold of New York City hours later, the swirling snow reminding her of the first time they’d met. It’s enough to make her think that New York is always this snow globe, all shaken up and with nowhere to look but the towering sky. It’s a feeling she’d be hard pressed to make sense of, but it’s one she’s felt before. One she likes.

Columbia’s campus spans six-city blocks. It reminds her of Foreman. Every stone, corner, kid reading a textbook or tapping away at a computer. New York City _is_ her and Foreman, she thinks. Every part of them lives somewhere in it.

She pulls up to Foreman’s apartment building, winds her scarf around her neck and steps out.

The front door of the building opens. Then Foreman’s on the steps and she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her. And he’s _seeing_ her, all of her, all of her courage, her convictions, how all of them live through her very existence. Her ash in the wind, the fire keeping her brittle heart going.

“You shaved your head,” she says. She doesn’t say anything more, but the way she ends it makes it sound as if she does want to go on. She feels like as if she should.

Foreman runs a gloved hand over the top of it. He bites his lip instead of replying, looks to the sky for a second and shakes his head. Then he’s suddenly in front of her and his arms are wrapping around her and there she is — there she is, finally, in his arms.

She can’t tell herself not to fall in love anymore, Cameron thinks. She’s already swung for the fences.

“You upgraded,” Foreman says, on the car. His lips are just brushing her forehead, but she can still feel them.

Cameron huffs lightly. “She’s still in Chicago,” she says. “It’s my uncle’s.”

“Should’ve known,” Foreman says. “You never had good taste, Ally-from-the-Valley.”

She pulls back from the hug and looks at him in his brown eyes. “I like to think that I do,” Cameron says.

She can see him process that, in the silence they’re sharing — the kind that only comes when two people understand each other — and when he gets her meaning, truly gets it.

 _The Devil’s in the details,_ she thinks.

“You beat my heart,” she says. As flowery as it sounds, it’s true. “I don’t think I want to be where you aren’t.”

“That rhymed,” he points out.

“It did,” she agrees. “Tell me what I need to do, because I’m struggling.”

Foreman’s eyes flick up, back at the apartment building. “You coming in?” _You’re here, that’s enough._ He doesn’t say that part out loud, but she’s learned to read between the lines.

“It’s a pretty thought,” Cameron says. “Can I kiss you first?”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Foreman says. “Maybe I want to kiss you.”

Then he’s moving forward so she’s closing the gap, as softly as she can, the warmth of his skin ghosting hers in the cold winter air. He’s deepening the kiss, so she’s just-touching her hands on the sides of his face so he can do it comfortably and then he’s doing the same, carding his fingers through her hair, unravelling the elastic from her low ponytail and rolling it over his wrist. He tilts his head, works his way down her jawline, then —

“— I can’t do what I want to do with your coat on,” he mumbles, pulling back just-so. “And probably not in the street, either.”

Cameron can’t help but laugh in the crook of his neck. “Is it something that’d be nice after a first date, too? Not counting the time we jacked a car and got coffee after.”

“Well, there goes my idea,” Foreman says. He extends the bend of his arm so that she can slip her arm through it. “Upstairs?”

“Upstairs,” Cameron says. It sounds good to hear herself say. “Any cute roommates? In case we don’t work out.”

“I’m not answering that,” Foreman says. They’re in the stairwell, now. Holding all this in the hall. “Hey,” he says.

“What?”

“You beat my heart too.”

Cameron almost socks him one for making fun of her. Then she realises the meaning behind it. “Thanks,” she says.

“Any time,” Foreman says.

The best thing, Cameron thinks, is that she knows he means it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
